On- and offline ultrasonic characterization of components built by SLM additive manufacturing

Additive manufacturing processes have become commercially available and are particularly interesting for the production of free-formed parts. Selective laser melting allows for manufacturing components by localized melting of successive layers of metal powder. In this contribution, we report on investigations in view of the influence of the process parameter ‘laser power’ on the microstructure of the manufactured component. It turned out that the online recorded A-scans allow inferring conclusions about the quality of the SLM process. We also report on offline measurements which have been performed to support the online results.